Angry - Minions of the Darkness won't flinch, even after massive damage.

With only two weeks left until The Taken King expansion launches we are experiencing a deluge of information. I decided that there was too much to slip into the weekly recap, so here is a whole article of Destiny goodness for you to sink your teeth into or ignore if you don't like Destiny! We were treated to two streams in the past week. The first featured the new Shield Brother's strike and details about each of the new subclasses. You can watch the Shield Brothers stream in its entirety here. Below is a recap of some of the major points.

Strike bosses in TTK will be more dynamic and less in the way of bullet sponges. The Shield Brothers strike features two bosses who tag in and out, each with a different combat style. When one falls, the other gains its powers.

All strikes will feature rotating enemy, turret, and ammo locations to increase replay-ability.

New strikes will feature less cover. It will be much harder to cheese these strikes!

A new heavy weapon type, the Sword, was featured. Swords both deal elemental damage and can block damage of other element types. Very useful in boss fights!

Strikes drop unique loot based on the bosses. Ex. a Shield Brothers themed piece of gear.

The second stream detailed some of what can be found inside the new patrol area in Destiny, the Dreadnaught. A new type of public event was shown off called the Court of Oryx, where fire teams can manually activate the events and fight up several tiers of enemies for higher level loot drops. You can watch this stream in its entirety here, and here is a recap below.

There will be a new type of planetary material on the Dreadnaught, Wormspore. Perks on ghost shells and armor can now highlight planetary materials with waypoints for easy collection.

There have been 3 confirmed sword heavy weapons so far, one arc, one void, and one solar. The solar sword is an exotic known as Raze-Lighter, with the special ability of a second more powerful swing type called Phoenix Uppercut.

Taken enemies can now appear on any planet in patrol, and will appear frequently in the Dreadnaught. Small events can occur where named Taken are summoned, and special rewards can be gained from defeating them.

One of these such rewards are runes. Runes can be used to summon bosses in the new Court of Oryx public event system. These bosses come in three tiers and feature unique systems that must be understood to defeat them. Tier 3 bosses are said to be near raid-level and drop appropriate loot for such difficulty.

In addition, we've also learned a few important tidbits about strikes in general in TTK. They and more can be found in the Bungie Weekly Update.

Nightfall strikes will no longer send you to orbit after a wipe.

Players will now have a 30 second wait between dying and being able to be revived.

Weekly Heroic Strikes are gone, being replaced by a Weekly Heroic Strike playlist.

There are two other playlists: Vanguard Legacy, which features all of the Year 1 strikes, and Vanguard Marmoset, which features the new strikes with TTK.

It has also been revealed that the raid in TTK, King's Fall, will be available on September 18th, 3 days after TTK launches. This is likely to allow everyone to get to level 40 and start on the same page when the raid launches, such as was done for the Vault of Glass in year 1. We also got an interview with Luke Smith about the philosophy behind raid design in Destiny.

There has been quite a lot of footage captured from TTK by players who got a chance to try out the expansion. The first link is heavy with spoilers, so you have been warned!

Finally, the TTK update that includes the weapon update the the new ghost will be launching on September 8th, 1 week prior to TTK itself. That’s all for Destiny news this week! With the streams officially finished and the weapon update about to drop it's only a short time until The Taken King is upon us!